Summary: Local news sources are going down the toilet.

Meanwhile neighborhood blogs are popping up all over the place.

Let's build memetrackers calibrated to the peculiar rhythms of local news that will give you an unvarnished, fluff-less picture of what's news in your city right now, who's linking to who and where you can read about it.

I've been running a crude test version for a few weeks now in Chicago and on a day when the top story on the Tribune's web site is about how to sleep soundly at night, the memetracker showed that every outlet in town and a few blogs had covered a stabbing on the west side. That story was buried on the Trib's site, and was much more interesting.

Thoughts?

Interesting! Did any other HN folks submit to the Knight Challenge?

the problem with local news is that there really isn't that much of it. Most of it is very mundane, that most people really don't care about.

On one level I agree. There's a point at which no one cares about the news.

That's kind of the idea for this though, solving that problem. A memetracker/content recommendation system done right would just give you stuff that editors/bloggers/social media folks find interesting, so you'd get the local highlights every X minutes.